Scrivener is great for novels and other long-form writing. But I use it as an organizing tool for all of my writing, which is mainly short form. I have one Scrivener file I named Substack which contains all of the stories I have published over the past three years on Substack. I have folders for Story Ideas, In Progress stories, and Ready To Publish stories. All of the published stories are organized into folders also, such as One Minute Wit, Microfiction, Humor, Fiction, Poetry, etc. It makes finding stories a breeze.
I use separate Scrivener files for my novels because they contain lots of research and notes. And I like having it all in one file. The Novel template does most of the setup work for you. And the ability to easily move chapter around at will is awesome.
Scrivener is very adaptable to what you want it to be. And perfect for an organizing geek like me. And a bargain!
I am a notebook writer but the latest project is proving to be anything other than straight forward. Is it easy to move scenes around / change the timeline?
Cool, thanks for insights, lessons and inspiration shared. Like the small "beginning" portion of tutorial you cover in your Scrivener series. Plain and simple to follow. Great work Simon.
I suspect I'll in a close future take a leap from Evernote to Scrivener as Evernote, the platform I use, feels nothing close to Scrivener in terms of organizing and structuring ideas and such alike, and not to mention other issues I got related to syncing between devices on Evernote.
Have to ask, do you have any experience co-writing on Scrivener and in that case, what is your experience in regards to functionality?
I could see this being useful in my day job for certain (long-form legal writer). But for substack short nonfiction essays, I think maybe I could get some use out of it as well. I’ll noodle on it, but I do tend to cite original research, articles, and books in my work here. I can see maybe creating a binder for each essay and collating all the source materials. I’m assuming you can import pdf documents. Thanks for this intro—I’m intrigued! I’m going to pop over to their site and look around.
Thanks Simon, I‘m a beginner, with a stack of short stories, a newsletter, and I‘m working on a longer project. I‘ll keep watching, hoping to convince myself that I need a tool like that for the big project.
Great video and I think you capture what Scrivener is all about. I love having my world-building and character notes readily accessible in one file (although sometimes I make random notes in draft emails when I'm AFK that I need to port over to the project file). Looking forward to the next installment!
The one feature I wish they would add would be sharing parts of a project across multiple projects. This would be useful for books in a series. I'm up to book 3 in my series, and I have to move over all the character/location/world-building notes to the newest book each time. It would be great to have one corpus of notes for a particular series. (Also I'm writing two things in the same series at the same time, so things are currently messy).
I've thought about using Notion as a substitute for this, but haven't gotten around to seeing if that would work well.
I currently use Scrivener for my serial and for my 100 Word Stories. I also have a Story Bible for any universe I create that holds all the character/location sheets as well as master outlines for everything I'm writing or intend to write in the future. Scrivener is great for creating Story Bibles (as I like to call them).
When it comes to my 100 Word Stories with each month being a "theme" and the fact that I need to not only track each story but collect them into groups of 100 for each book I will begin to release this year, having Scrivener to do that is helpful.
I don't currently use it for anything else. Meaning, that I likely won't ever use the Compile feature until I prepare to take Sleight of Hand (my 2024 serial) from it's serial form to novel form and even then, it will just be to get it from a .scriv file to a .docx to then import it to .indd as that's what I always use to format my work prior to uploading it to whatever program I'm using for print publishing.
I realize I went too deep down the rabbit hole on this already! lol Excellent tutorial. I am sure many will get a handle on it surely. Though, you might want to mention cost. I was surprised you didn't mention that first. I always will say "it costs X amount BUT if you participate in Nano then you can get it 25% off for participating and 50% off for finishing Nano with 50k words." Helps so people don't get put off by the $50 price tag. At least, I think it's still $50? I'm not sure. I purchased Scrivener over a decade ago...
Scrivener was a life saver for me: For every project I start there’s always pages and pages of notes/ideas. Scrivener helped me to distribute the notes in a way that I could make sense of it all. I really couldn’t do without it.
I've attempted and abandoned it multiple times. My latest project however may benefit for all the reasons you describe. Importing all the notes, research, latest draft into Scrivener from my current docs and apps? Well, that maybe be yet another challenge. But I will take a fresh look. So, thanks Simon. I think...
I wish Scrivener would have a Publish to Substack, WordPress, Medium, etc feature so it would be more useful as a central database for all writing. But I use it to organize all my essays I publish on multiple platforms.
Scrivener is great for novels and other long-form writing. But I use it as an organizing tool for all of my writing, which is mainly short form. I have one Scrivener file I named Substack which contains all of the stories I have published over the past three years on Substack. I have folders for Story Ideas, In Progress stories, and Ready To Publish stories. All of the published stories are organized into folders also, such as One Minute Wit, Microfiction, Humor, Fiction, Poetry, etc. It makes finding stories a breeze.
I use separate Scrivener files for my novels because they contain lots of research and notes. And I like having it all in one file. The Novel template does most of the setup work for you. And the ability to easily move chapter around at will is awesome.
Scrivener is very adaptable to what you want it to be. And perfect for an organizing geek like me. And a bargain!
Yes! I refuse to draft or make developmental edits in anything but Scrivener. It's such a fabulous writing tool!
I am a notebook writer but the latest project is proving to be anything other than straight forward. Is it easy to move scenes around / change the timeline?
Cool, thanks for insights, lessons and inspiration shared. Like the small "beginning" portion of tutorial you cover in your Scrivener series. Plain and simple to follow. Great work Simon.
I suspect I'll in a close future take a leap from Evernote to Scrivener as Evernote, the platform I use, feels nothing close to Scrivener in terms of organizing and structuring ideas and such alike, and not to mention other issues I got related to syncing between devices on Evernote.
Have to ask, do you have any experience co-writing on Scrivener and in that case, what is your experience in regards to functionality?
Update: plays fine in a mobile browser. It's just yet another bug in the mobile app, which I really should delete, because the app is utterly broken.
I could see this being useful in my day job for certain (long-form legal writer). But for substack short nonfiction essays, I think maybe I could get some use out of it as well. I’ll noodle on it, but I do tend to cite original research, articles, and books in my work here. I can see maybe creating a binder for each essay and collating all the source materials. I’m assuming you can import pdf documents. Thanks for this intro—I’m intrigued! I’m going to pop over to their site and look around.
Thanks Simon, I‘m a beginner, with a stack of short stories, a newsletter, and I‘m working on a longer project. I‘ll keep watching, hoping to convince myself that I need a tool like that for the big project.
Great video and I think you capture what Scrivener is all about. I love having my world-building and character notes readily accessible in one file (although sometimes I make random notes in draft emails when I'm AFK that I need to port over to the project file). Looking forward to the next installment!
The one feature I wish they would add would be sharing parts of a project across multiple projects. This would be useful for books in a series. I'm up to book 3 in my series, and I have to move over all the character/location/world-building notes to the newest book each time. It would be great to have one corpus of notes for a particular series. (Also I'm writing two things in the same series at the same time, so things are currently messy).
I've thought about using Notion as a substitute for this, but haven't gotten around to seeing if that would work well.
I currently use Scrivener for my serial and for my 100 Word Stories. I also have a Story Bible for any universe I create that holds all the character/location sheets as well as master outlines for everything I'm writing or intend to write in the future. Scrivener is great for creating Story Bibles (as I like to call them).
When it comes to my 100 Word Stories with each month being a "theme" and the fact that I need to not only track each story but collect them into groups of 100 for each book I will begin to release this year, having Scrivener to do that is helpful.
I don't currently use it for anything else. Meaning, that I likely won't ever use the Compile feature until I prepare to take Sleight of Hand (my 2024 serial) from it's serial form to novel form and even then, it will just be to get it from a .scriv file to a .docx to then import it to .indd as that's what I always use to format my work prior to uploading it to whatever program I'm using for print publishing.
I realize I went too deep down the rabbit hole on this already! lol Excellent tutorial. I am sure many will get a handle on it surely. Though, you might want to mention cost. I was surprised you didn't mention that first. I always will say "it costs X amount BUT if you participate in Nano then you can get it 25% off for participating and 50% off for finishing Nano with 50k words." Helps so people don't get put off by the $50 price tag. At least, I think it's still $50? I'm not sure. I purchased Scrivener over a decade ago...
Scrivener was a life saver for me: For every project I start there’s always pages and pages of notes/ideas. Scrivener helped me to distribute the notes in a way that I could make sense of it all. I really couldn’t do without it.
I've attempted and abandoned it multiple times. My latest project however may benefit for all the reasons you describe. Importing all the notes, research, latest draft into Scrivener from my current docs and apps? Well, that maybe be yet another challenge. But I will take a fresh look. So, thanks Simon. I think...
Simon, did you get my email about Scrivener? I haven't heard from you about it and just wanted to check.
I wish Scrivener would have a Publish to Substack, WordPress, Medium, etc feature so it would be more useful as a central database for all writing. But I use it to organize all my essays I publish on multiple platforms.
Been using Scrivener since 2015. I know I don’t use half of its potencial.
It’s always fun to hear about how people are using Scrivener. Coincidentally, I published a post about Scrivener (and other writing tools) just yesterday: I call it one of my “Containers for Chaos”! https://open.substack.com/pub/helensword/p/how-i-wrote-writing-with-pleasure
Yeah I like the granularity of moving around scenes.